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 כ"ה בתשרי תשע"ח / Sunday, Oct. 15 '17 Subscribe to this Daily Israel Report -http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Subscribe Headlines
1. Internal protest after terrorist speaks at European Parliamentby Arutz Sheva Staff Some members of the European Parliament have turned to the parliament's President Antonio Tajani, requesting changes to EP protocol so as to prevent the future possibility of terrorists speaking before the parliament. According to Israel Hayom, the request came last week, after terrorist Leila Khaled spoke before the parliament last month. Khaled was a member of the PFLP terror group who was involved in airplane hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s. PFLP is included in the EP's list of terror groups. On August 29, 1969, Khaled participated in the hijacking of an American “TWA” airline plane heading from Rome to Athens. On October 6, 1970, she and an accomplice attempted to hijack an El Al flight heading from Tel Aviv to New York via Amsterdam. Israel Hayom reported that Khaled had participated in an event held at the EP and initiated by members of the leftist NGL/GUE parties, which support strongly anti-Israel positions and the BDS movement. According to the report, the intra-European protest was submitted to Tajani by representatives of Italy, Slovenia, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Lithuania, and Denmark in the parliament, and was warmly welcomed in Israel. 2. Noy Sheetrit's Muslim partner: 'Over my dead body - love wins'by Mordechai Sones Noy Sheetrit's conversion to Islam on the Temple Mount to accommodate her partner Alla Abu Sajir incensed the Israeli public and sparked an Internet storm. The Lehava anti-assimilation organization entered the picture in vigorous protest and led Noy to return to the fold of Judaism, at least temporarily. He works as a handyman and did not tell her that he is still married. "I'm in the midst of a divorce, only Noy is in my life," he explains. "It's no different from marrying a second, third, or fourth wife," he says, adding: "I'd be lying if I told you it's not in all the Bedouin communities." Noy made it clear that she was happy: "Arab or not Arab - I don't care, I'm at peace with what I chose." Ammar, Alaa's brother, says that she was not pressured - she was accepted into the family without coercion. "There are a lot of girls - Noy is the heart," explains Alaa. His family says his father is also married to a Jewess and has children. "What's so strange about it?" asks Sami, Alaa's uncle - and he confirms that they both plan to have children. "Over my dead body, I won't give up on her. She is living between the two religions, between being a single woman and being a second wife." The two were threatened over the social networks and through telephone calls. In one of them, Alaa was told: "We'll leave you in the grave; release the girl - and we'll release your life; don't let the girl go - I won't release your life and I'll finish you." "What is this racism?" Alaa wondered, adding that he changed his phone number "about ten times" since the story began. "People will always have something to say, people aren't okay with a Jewish girl going with an Arab, I will not fall for such people," Noy said. "Take time and you'll see that it's good for me." After the wedding, Lehava initiated a relationship with the two in order to separate them, and Noy did temporarily return to Judaism. The next day, the head of the organization, Bentzi Gopstein, held a ceremony at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hevron. [youtube:2033848] But Sajir did not give up: "Lehava took her. She told them that she wanted to go back, and she went back to her mother - from her mother she came back straight to me." How does he explain it? "They filled her head, told her a lot of things. She did not know that they were Lehava people and that there were liars around her." Noy returned to Rahat. "I filed a complaint with the police; what does this organization want from our lives?" He rejected claims that he was abusing and exploiting Sheetrit: "The truth, love wins. I love Noy with all my heart, this is her first love." 3. Report: Bennett to demand PM cut ties with Palestinian Authorityby Chana Roberts Education Minister Naftali Bennett (Jewish Home) will demand Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sever all ties with the Palestinian Authority (PA), Channel 2 reported. According to the report, Bennett will attend a Sunday meeting of the coalition party heads, and demand Netanyahu sever ties with the PA, and retroactively cancel all agreements with them. Among the agreements Bennett will demand canceled are the construction of a new neighborhood on the outskirts of Ramallah, and the construction of an industrial zone in the Hevron-area Arab town of Tarqumiyah. Last Thursday, the PA and Hamas signed a reconciliation agreement. The agreement covers three issues: Solving the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, transferring crossings and borders to the control of the PA, and creating joint committees for authority, legal issues, and weapons. On Friday, Bennett said that "Any cooperation...will only encourage terror. A union between PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas will turn the PA into a terrorist entity. The State of Israel must sever all relations with this terror organization." US Special Envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt is expected to visit Tarqumiyah on Monday. 4. Terror attack thwarted at Samaria military courtby Uzi Baruch A Palestinian Arab arrived a short while ago to the military court in Samaria near the village of Salem. He was apparently carrying a pipe bomb on his person. Border Policeman and military police arrested a suspect a short time ago, thwarting a terror attack. The entrance to the court is blocked at present while forces secure the site, and a police bomb disposal expert is on the way to the court. 5. Canadian rabbi realizes 'egregious error' was madeby JTA A Canadian rabbi who participated in the planning of a Holocaust memorial monument whose plaque omitted any reference to Jews apologized for what he said was inattentiveness. Rabbi Daniel Friedman of Edmonton made the apology in an interview this week with the Ottawa Citizen about a gaffe that ended with the removal of the plaque of the Canada National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa ahead of its replacement with a plaque that does mention Jews. At the Sept. 27 opening ceremony of Canada’s first Holocaust memorial, “we suddenly realized an egregious error has been made,” said Friedman, who chaired the advisory council on the monument’s creation. Bernie Farber, a former official of the defunct Canadian Jewish Congress, and Mira Sucharov, a Carleton University professor in Ottawa, criticized the “misplaced outrage” caused by the mistake. Initially, Jewish critics and partisan politicians blamed senior Ottawa bureaucrats and even Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who spoke at the opening and had previously made a similar gaffe. But it soon became evident that although the Holocaust monument was an unambiguously “Jewish” site, the error was chiefly the council’s, with part of the blame put on the government’s Heritage Ministry, the governmental arm responsible for the monument. The controversy erupted soon after the $7.2 million memorial’s opening, even making the pages of The New York Times and Washington Post. The Israel Defense Forces on its official website for years commemorated 11 million victims of the Holocaust, although six million Jews died in the genocide. 6. Thousands of Kurdish Peshmerga deployed to Kirkuk to face Iraqby Mordechai Sones [youtube:2033850] Thousands of Iraqi troops were locked in an armed standoff with Kurdish forces in the disputed oil-rich province of Kirkuk as Washington scrambled to avert fighting between its allies in the war against ISIS, reported AFP. The Kurds said yesterday (Saturday) that Baghdad set a deadline for their forces to surrender positions they took during the fight against the jihadists over the past three years. The deadline, first set for 2:00 am Sunday (2300 GMT Saturday), was extended by 24 hours during a meeting overnight, AFP quoted an anonymous Kurdish official saying. Hemin Hawrami, Senior assistant to President Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Regional Government, said "We are a peaceful people and been victims of history & oppression. We never attacked anyone, always defended our people & our land. For protecting Kirkuk , every single Kurd is a peshemrge. Do not test our will."
On Saturday, armoured vehicles bearing the Iraqi national flag were posted on the bank of a river on the southern outskirts of the city of Kirkuk, an AFP photographer reported. Kurdish Peshmerga help people who fled homes in Hawija to be transported to displaced camp in southw צילום: Reuters On the opposite bank, Kurdish peshmerga fighters were visible behind an earthen embankment topped with concrete blocks and the red, white, green and yellow colors of the Kurdish flag. Kurdish Peshmerga detain men suspected of being ISIS barbarians southwest of Kirkuk, Iraq צילום: Reuters "Our forces are not moving and are now waiting for orders from the general staff," an Iraqi army officer told AFP, asking not to be identified. Just before midnight (2100 GMT) Iraqi forces used megaphones to call on the peshmerga fighters to withdraw, said AFP. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said there can be no discussion of the Kurds’ long-standing demands to incorporate Kirkuk and other historically Kurdish areas in their autonomous region until the independence vote is annulled. He insisted on Thursday that he was “not going... to make war on our Kurdish citizens”. But, reports AFP, thousands of heavily armed troops and members of the Popular Mobilisation Force (PMF) — paramilitary units largely made up of Iran-trained Shia militias — have massed around Kirkuk. They have already retaken a string of positions to the south of the city after Kurdish forces withdrew. The Kurds deployed thousands of peshmerga fighters to the area around Kirkuk itself and have vowed to defend the city “at any cost”. Just hours before the deadline, a peshmerga commander on the western front said Kurdish fighters had “taken all the necessary measures” and were “ready for a confrontation” if necessary. If “the other side makes the mistake of advancing, we’ll give them a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry”, Kamal Kirkuki said. Kurdish Peshmerga fighters ride in vehicle Southwest of Kirkuk צילום: Reuters So far the front lines have been quiet but the Kurds said they had received an ultimatum to withdraw. “The deadline set for the peshmerga to return to their pre-June 6, 2014 positions will expire during the night,” a senior Kurdish official told AFP, asking not to be identified. Asked at what time, he said 2300 GMT on Saturday. The official’s comments came as Iraqi President Fuad Masum, who is himself a Kurd, was holding crisis talks in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. The June 2014 lines are those that the Kurds held before ISIS swept through vast areas north and west of Baghdad, prompting many Iraqi army units to disintegrate and Kurdish forces to fill the vacuum. The Kurds control the city of Kirkuk and three major oil fields in the province which account for a significant share of the regional government’s oil revenues. 7. Uruguayan Holocaust memorial vandalized with anti-Semitic slursby JTA JTA - A Uruguayan Holocaust memorial rededicated last year was vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti minimizing the Holocaust. “They have vandalized us again. What’s going on?” Montevideo Mayor Carlos Varela tweeted along with photos of the vandalized memorial. “We call for sanity, tolerance and peace,” he added. Unveiled in 1994, the site in the country’s capital Montevideo has been hit several times in recent years by anti-Semitic vandalism, but this time has been the most severe with the graffiti taking up a larger area of the memorial, reported El Pais newspaper. Vandals used black paint to write slurs including “The Holocaust of the Jewish people is the biggest lie in history,” “Only 300,000 Jews died from typhus” and “Gas chambers were a fraud.” In 2016, the Israelite Central Committee, the country’s umbrella Jewish organization, funded the latest restoration, which included lights and staircases. “We repudiate the anti-Semitic graffiti with concepts that deny the Holocaust of the Jewish people. The monument is a memory exercise to never forget the criminal regime that pursued and systematically murdered six million Jews for the only fact of their existence,” read a statement released by the committee. “Today our pain is large and we are ashamed before the survivors of the massacre that are still among us, their children, grandchildren and all the Jewish people. Our country, which is democratic and pluralistic, the melting pot of cultures, does not deserve such atrocities,” the statement also said. 8. Meet the airborne gunfighters in Californiaby Yissachar Ruas [youtube:2033835] Over the years the US Marine Corps (USMC) has been known as a force that gets more done with less available resources. In comparison to other branches of service like the Air Force or the Army, Marines have always been considered much more cost effective. In recent years this presumption is changing fast, after much of Marine Aviation received a significant upgrade with the introduction of the MV-22 and the F-35B. Currently, the Marines own 2 of the most advanced systems in the theater of operations, and the USMC will start producing a new amphibious vehicle in 2018. Having seen ground combat up close in recent years I was keen to find out how Close Air Support (CAS) was conducted by an organic force. Marines Operate as an organic force, which means that at the battalion level they can field tanks, infantry, close air support and a variety of other combat tools. Whether in the air, land, or sea, they are a self-sufficient combat force. While the USMC is probably as much on par technologically with the USAF and US Navy than it has ever been before, some areas of the force from the outside seem to be similar to the US Forces operating in Vietnam in the 1960s. I joined a Marine Helo Squadron’s day of operations supporting an infantry unit in simulated combat in Southern California. While South Cali may have in the past reminded the forces of the desert complexion of Iraq and Afghanistan, following a pretty decent year of rainfall, the area surrounding their home base Camp Pendleton is looking more lush and green than it has been in years. The Squadron I joined, HMLA 369 is a Marine Light Attack Squadron which means it operates both the UH-1Y Venom or “Yankee” as it is affectionately called as well as the AH-1Z better known as “Zulu.” Known as the “Gunfighters,” this squadron was established in 1972 as the Vietnam War was winding down. From then to this day, this squadron has performed the same mission with almost the same basic type aircraft. Although Vietnam may have been a different war, the wars of today in Afghanistan and Iraq demand the same basic skill set from its Marines, air and ground crew alike. The CAS mission I am slated to join is supposed to be relatively simple – provide close air support for the 3rd Battalion Marines also known as the “Darkhorse” and lay down cover fire and observational support when needed. The Darkhorse Battalion was established prior to WW1 and their name is synonymous with battles such as Guadalcanal in WW2 and Da Nang in the Vietnam War. Following the mission brief we make our way to Camp Pendleton’s sprawling tarmac littered with just about every type of vertical landing craft that exists in the Marine Corps, a seemingly endless line of Zulus and Yankees are our destination for the morning run. Although both the Yankee and Zulus forefathers fought in the Vietnam war, the helos the Gunfighters operate today may look very similar on the outside, but inside they are cutting edge 21st century technology. We take off in formation with the Cobra flying lead, we are heading to California’s Southern Coast to the point “our Marines” have landed. Very soon it becomes apparent that just like in real combat, we weren’t given accurate information. While flying over the beach, we cant spot any Marines at the designated LZ. The lead pilot is constantly checking with Battalion HQ and Squadron Operations for a “fix” on where the infantry is located. Following quite a bit of back and forth we head inland, since it seems the Marines had moved quite a bit forward from where they were initially expected to have progressed. Once the lead Cobra pilot gets a beat on them, we are heading out to support them. As we get closer to the Battalion, we start to see quite a bit of activity on the ground, lots of Hummers LTVs ATVs and even tanks are spotted. I can hear the lead pilot engaging with the troops trying to make sense on the fly of what the battle picture looks like. Attached to the Battalion is a Marine known as a Joint Terminal Attack Controller or J-TAC for short. The JTAC’s job is to provide coordination between the ground element and the units in the air to deliver weapons on enemy positions at close contact. Our element is directed by the JTAC to deploy its weapons at enemy positions prior to the Battalion charging it. The conversation is very fluid in making sure the air element identifies the target accurately. Once weapons are exhausted we head back to base with another successful training mission for this “Gunfighter” crew. Once back at Camp Pendleton I get the chance to speak briefly with one of the newest “Gunfighters” - 1st LT. Alexander Kovensky, a New Jersey Native with a strong sense of duty. Kovensky dreamed of becoming a Marine Pilot as a young boy, and September 11, 2001, was very much a tipping point in pushing him in that direction. Lt. Kovensky is fresh out of HMLA 303 the Cobra training squadron, he is one of the Gunfighter’s younger aviators. He notes that the first time he fired the Cobra’s 30mm canon was when he felt the long rode he took to becoming a USMC Aviator was finally paying off dividends. The Gunfighters may have a veteran soul, but they definitely have some young hearts to keep the juices flowing. Special thanks to the Camp Pendleton PA - Captain Adibe and Lt. Harrison. [album:open:10000] Subscribe to this Daily Israel Report - http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Subscribe | |
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